The Software

The list of included applications on the VR3 is impressive, and covers
most of the functionality provided by a Palm. In short form, the
applications included (as of 2001.05.15) are:

Calculator -- Basic, Scientific or Programmer modes.

Contacts Management.

Expense Tracking.

Notes.

Schedule.

To-Do Lists.

World-Clock -- Graphical viewer of current time around the globe.

E-Mail, Faxing and IR-Remote applications are all planned for free download
after June 2001.

In addition, there are several games included with the VR3. The
Ace of Penguins suite of games by D.J. Delorie is installed,
providing Solitaire, Freecell, Golf, Merlin, and several others.
There is also a Tetris clone, a Mines clone, Checkers, and a
pretty impressive Space Invaders type marching game called Aliens.

Under the System menu are the usual control interfaces for Contrast,
setting the Date and Time, adjusting power-usage functions (when to
power off, battery state). The Network application lets you establish
connections to other devices, covered further below.

One entry under the System menu of particular interest is the StatusBar
application. When launched, it opens a thin window at the top of the display
and shows current time, battery condition and the name of the currently
focused application. The StatusBar can also display the list of
opened windows (or at least, most of them), and let you switch between
them easily.

The other entry in the System menu of particular interest to geeks is
the Terminal. When selected, a shell will pop up. A real, honest
to Unix /bin/sh shell! With a $ prompt and everything.
Type in bash, and you're greeted with bash-2.00$

Cool.

A fairly complete set of command-line tools are included, many provided
by Busybox 0.48. This package emulates several
common commands, but as of version 0.48 vi was not one of them. And
in fact, an editor is not provided on the default installation, although
cat and sed are always an option for those seriously determined.

Most, but not all of the GUI programs run in full screen mode. Checkers,
for example, opens a window only big enough for itself. This reveals an exciting property -- X Windows decorations and widgets! Drag bar,
Window close and minimizing -- it's all there. Folks, we're really
running X Windows!

Character Input

As with most PDA devices, there are two ways of inputting data into the
VR3 -- a virtual, on-screen keyboard, or handwriting recognition (HWR).
When the Keyboard soft-button is pressed, a 50 pixel high by full width window
will appear at the bottom section of the screen which is where all input
actions are performed.

The window will contain one of two virtual
keyboards (one for letters and the other numbers/symbols), or four
small square writing areas, the first for upper case characters,
the next for lower case, the third for numbers, and the last
for symbols. Any already open windows will move or resize themselves
to make room for the keyboard window.

To switch between the three input modes, there is a small button in the
lower right hand corner to toggle between them. Starting with
Letters, the button is labeled "123" and takes you to the number and
symbol's input display. There the button is labeled "hwr", and leads
to the handwriting section, where the button is labeled "abc".

How good is the handwriting input functionality? Not too bad,
but not perfect. There are still some letters that I cannot reliably
input, such as B and D, it always thinks are H. Also, there are
some Graffiti strokes which I like to use, but which it doesn't recognize
at all (like the backwards F and V.)

The good news is that work is under way to improve the HWR, and the results
seen only in the last few weeks have been quite impressive. Don't even
bother trying to use the HWR included with the original developer versions.
Also, since the HWR engine is itself open source and takes classifier
data in known (and modifiable) formats, I know I can add the missing
strokes myself -- I just haven't been frustrated enough to do so yet.